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I’ve not yet blogged about the fact that my second daughter was born Caesarean Section nearly seven weeks premature (I say ‘yet’, it’s ridiculous, she’s three years old now) but actually I think I just take a long time to get beyond these things. I’ll do it one day. We were lucky, she hardly spent any time in the Special Care Baby Unit, she was a comparatively ginormous 4lb 1oz, but the whole experience was, and remains, a terrible shock. Basically I went in for a scan and came out with a baby. Big fright.
However, I must say that Baby Led Weaning was an absolute godsend when it came to knowing when to start giving her solids. The advice is so conflicting, some doctors say that you should leave it until the baby would have been 6 months, some say that you should do it 6 months after birth, and indeed some say you should go earlier because babies have missed out on that valuable ‘fattening up for the winter’ time late on in the womb.
My instinct, of course, was to leave it later. It didn’t make sense to me that my child’s internal organs would be maturing any faster than her outsides (and I did ask, many times, for an explanation). ‘It has been exposed to food early’ never really chimed with me, and I didn’t feel that my daughter was lacking in vitamins and minerals because we had supplemented (when I could get her in a half-Nelson to administer them – she might have been small, but she was determined) with liquid vits since birth.
Thank God, then, for the fact that my experiences with Baby-Led Weaning my first child had given me the confidence to trust HER to make the decision as to when the time was right. Of course the memories are hazy, and what with her being an NSC (Neglected Subsequent Child) the photographic record is less complete than with my first daughter, but at round about a birth age of 5 and a half months she reached out and grabbed her first bit of solid food and chomped away. She was a very different kid to wean, actually, for lots of reasons that I should blog about sometime, but I can say that at the age of three she is a wee darling, robust as they come, and her favourite food in the whole world is ratatouille.
So thank you to all the staff of the hospital who looked after us so beautifully, who calmed our fears and dried our tears when we realised that it was all going to happen A Lot Sooner than she or we expected. Kind thoughts to those parents who spent longer in SCBU and strength and courage to those little, little babies who keep going against all the odds.
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Tags: preemie, premature, prematurity
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